3 Content Marketing Growth Hacks

3 Content Marketing Growth Hacks

One of the things that we have been talking about quite a bit on this blog is a concept that we’ve come up with called content hacking. It’s about learning to get more from your content than just another blog post with the occasional tweet. It’s about using your content to drive maximum traffic and lots of attention.It’s about getting results, in other words. After all, why else would you be creating content?

With that in mind, here are 2 videos of Neil Patel explaining ways that you can growth hack your content marketing:

Neil Patel on How to Growth Hack Your Content Marketing PART 1

Neil Patel on How to Growth Hack Your Content Marketing PART 2

Here are 3 growth hacks that any business can use to hone their content strategy:

Growth Hack 1 –Decide a Better Data-Driven Content

The basis of growth hacking is built around the concept of data-driven decision management. As content hackers, we want to use analytics backed by hard data to influence — and ultimately dictate — our content strategy and verticals.

Monitor Google Analytics: What areas of your website are receiving the most traffic? What pages are consumers staying on the longest? That will tell you what content is drawing and keeping people on your site and in turn, what content you need to be producing more of.

Enhance Social Media Engagement: Social media is the ultimate real-time consumer focus group for your content. Try different tactics and see what sticks. Once you find those “sticky” content areas, expand upon them and build out your social content cadence accordingly.

Boost Email Open Rates: Subject lines matter. A lot. Customize your subject lines and brand voice to help separate your emails from the competition. Try out different templates and see what delivers the highest open rate. Email marketing is a long-term reach strategy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t growth hack your user acquisition. While we’re at it, don’t be shy about collecting email addresses everywhere, including your social channels.

Analyze and mind your data. Let the data dictate your content “tent poles” and topics, and leave all emotion-based reasoning at the door.

Growth Hack 2 – Encourage Your Consumer to Share Your Content

While growth hacking has come to the forefront with the rise of startup empires like Airbnb, TwitterTWTR +0.38% and Warby Parker, its roots go farther back, even helping to build digital legacy brands like Hotmail.com. Arguably the “father” of growth hacking, Hotmail gained more than 12 million users in less than one year due to a simple line of text added to the bottom of every email, “P.S.: I love you” featuring a link back to their homepage.

That simple idea that Hotmail leveraged to fast-track their growth can be applied across your content strategy.

Share Your Own Content: You have to push your content out – don’t expect people to find it or come looking for it just because it’s associated with your brand. And don’t be afraid to share it more than once.

Ask the Consumer to Share Your Content (and Give Them the Tools to Share It): It might seem silly, but it’s OK to ask the community to share and comment on your content. That’s what the Social Web and is all about. Just don’t forget to give them the ability to share your content via social sharing tools.

Leverage the Power of Influencers: Work with brand-friendly influencers to increase the potential reach of your content. Whether it’s a celebrity, a “super” influencer or multiple social tastemakers and bloggers, work with them to increase your organic reach.

Recruit Word-of-Mouth Brand Advocates: Apply social listening tactics to your community management to identify and engage with your brand advocates to empower them to spread your content gospel.

Growth Hack 3 – Incorporate Visuals into Your Content

Content is king. We all know that by now. But that’s not enough anymore.

In 2013, social media management tool Buffer released a study that showed that tweets with images received18 percent more clicks and 150 percent more retweets than those without. That was when Twitter first added in-line images to tweet and before the addition of GIFs, videos and the evolution of branded emoticons to the social content sphere. I bet that if we were to run the same study today, that percentage would be much higher.

Visuals – both static and in motion – make users pause their timeline scrolling. If all your content is based around plain text messages only, content-hack your own feed with original images, animated images and videos as well as universally accepted emojis and pop culture references.

Content marketing is ultimately an inbound channel. Growth hacking your brand story is about making your content easier to find, consumable across all platforms, and easily shareable. Any concept or opportunity to do so is a hack worth exploring.